A Creature I Don't Know

On her third album, the British singer-songwriter proves to be an artist deeply invested in archetypes, one who doesn't muck about with the details of 21st-century life in her explorations of desire, loss, and understanding.

Laura Marling's music feels timeless. I don't mean "timeless" in the sense that people refer to, say, Adele or Duffy as timeless, when really they're really just evoking a very specific time that happens to be distant. Marling evokes other artists, too, but they're spread out over the past five decades of pop and rock, from Joni Mitchell, Fairport Convention, and Leonard Cohen to Fiona Apple, Tori Amos, and PJ Harvey. Still, her songs feel divorced from time, lacking clues or signposts to indicate whether her stories and scenes might be set 500 years ago or yesterday. Marling's first twoalbums were noteworthy in large part for their precociousness. Her newest is A Creature I Don't Know, and it's her first that can't benefit from stunning you with its level of maturity. This is simply who Marling is right now-- an artist deeply invested in archetypes, one who doesn't muck about with the details of 21st-century life in her explorations of desire, loss, and understanding.

Certainly it's a brave artistic approach, this notion of wrestling with only the most primal states of being and ignoring all the fleeting fads and noise that make up the rest of our world. At the same time, such a large part of songwriting is making human connections, and often with Marling it's not entirely clear whether these songs are springing forth from a 21-year-old Englishwoman or some deathless, wandering spirit. Her reliance on heavily symbolic language and lack of interest in putting more of her personality into her compositions creates frustrating paradoxes: Her music's intimate yet distant, earthy yet seemingly not of this earth.

That said, the success of each song on A Creature I Don’t Know hinges on how well Marling inhabits the role she's given herself. Fortunately, while she may not be a particularly revealing performer, she's an extremely commanding one. Marling's tendency is to be stark and direct, and her presence carries equal weight whether she's accompanied by little more than piano or guitar (the unnervingly hushed, death-obsessed "Night After Night") or a churning instrumental malestrom (the Neil Young-worthy "The Beast"). On "The Muse", "Salinas", and the Zeppelin III-goes-hoedown single "Sophia", Marling's scarily impressive self-possession actually spills over into a kind of wickedly controlling glee, as she adds domineering theatrical flourishes to certain words and phrases in a manner that comes reasonably close to matching Harvey during her mid-1990s reign. Marling may spend the majority of these songs and several others struggling to find wisdom and peace in the face of trials brought on by lust, money, and death, but she almost always sounds like she already has all the answers.